Trying to make sense of a world gone mad.... blogging on Climate Change, War, Terror - plus local stuff about Bristol and music and more...

Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Downward Spiral of the War on(of) Terror

I guess you will have heard the news of the murder of Benazir Bhutto. It is a sad day but, unfortunately, just one more unravelling part of the war of terror. The U$/UK administrations, flush with military power and dreaming of a neo-liberal compliant Middle East have set about doing everthing they could to make a bad situation worse. The War of Terror is a monumental cock-up of conspiratorial levels:

Pakistan: "The Pakistani authorities are blaming Muslim militants for the assassination. That is possible, but everyone in Pakistan remembers that it was the military intelligence, or Inter-Services Intelligence, that promoted Muslim militancy in the two decades before September 11 as a wedge against India in Afghanistan and Kashmir."

Afghanistan: "The Americans have a way of painting this black and white," said one European official. "For them it's like a cowboy film - you're either a good guy or a bad guy. But anyone with any experience in this country knows it's not that simple."

Somalia: The Islamic Courts Union driven from power a year ago by Western-backed troops is regrouping and planning a large-scale attack and the government can do little to stop it...

Palestine: "Are you wondering about the Annapolis meeting that will open this week? Will the meeting exceed the low expectations that now embrace it? The confab has already been downgraded from a 'conference' to just a 'meeting.'"

Iraq I: "The rate of attacks in Iraq (for all types) has stabilized at the levels of 2004/2005, which were prior to the bombing of Askariya. During this earlier period, Iraq's open source insurgency was highly decentralized. A good way to quantify this is through the analysis of Oxford's Neil Johnson, who plotted the number of attacks against casualties per attack. He found that the equilibrium point for Iraq's conflict (as well as the long running war in Colombia) was a power law with a coefficient of 2.5 . A conflict with a coefficient of 2.5 looks more like intensive terrorism than conventional warfare. It is also likely, given Colombia's experience, a level sustainable over decades of conflict."

Iraq II: Myth: The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants. Fact: In interviews with the Western press, Awakening Council tribesmen often speak of attacking the Shiites after they have polished off al-Qaeda.

"If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: governments lie."I.F. Stone

"The State is an abstraction devouring the life of the people." Michael Bakunin

"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."Jeremy Hardy